Tam, you ought to read Riding Rockets, by Mike Mullane, one of the shuttle astronauts. He points out that the shuttle was not a very good design- there was absolutely no system to safeguard the lives of the occupants, unlike every previous space vehicle. If everything did not work perfectly, the people inside were essentially screwed.

In short, in both the Challenger and Columbia losses (but especially Challenger), the people died because of the arrogance of the designers (aided and abetted by the arrogance of the bureacracy).

Just because its worth mentioning, the Raving Prophet has a point... but those escape plans?

Yah. In general they were to make you feel better about strapping what was basically a few million pounds of highly volatile explosives to your posterior. At the average acceleration any of the various systems we've used to hurtle a man into space, ejection tends to kill, and the escape doors... well you have under 3 seconds to realize you have a problem... and then you're dead.

Its risky business, always has been always will be until we come up with a better methood for breaking out of earth's gravity, while lifting a useful payload.

Columbia: Driving to work and hearing CapCom's repeated calls that would never be answered.Challenger: Telephone closet on 6B corridor, CIA Headquarters.Apollo 1: basement listening to WMAL when they broke into "That Happy Feeling" by Bert Kaempfert.How the Hell do our minds enable us all to remember such details?

Challenger - watched it in second grade. Many replays.Columbia - watched it from a towboat on the Mississippi. When they "lost radar contact" I knew it was a goner.Just reread "The Right Stuff" last week.

I was classmate and friend of Scott Smith son of Capt. Mike Smith Pilot STS-51-l, it was not a happy time around Clear Lake High School that's for sure. It seems all of our big space disasters happened right around this time of year, Apollo 1's anniversary was yesterday, Challenger's is today and Columbia's in 4 days.

Walking down a hallway in a .gov classified satellite program when a secretary poked her head out a door and spilled the news.

No access to TV's, so had to go to a friend's house that night to watch it on the news. He related that the Northrop B-2 program had shut down their entire phone system 45 seconds after it happened, but it was too late to keep everyone there from finding out also.

We'd all worked on the orbiter, and were debating all the various high-probability failures. Then we saw what happened.

It turned out to be cold-weather induced propellant slump in a solid rocket motor leading to a motor crack-equivalent flame front cutting through the rocket casing (You can see the cutting torch flame in the video right on the launch pad), and eventually right through the 17 inch main oxygen feed line leading to the top of the main tank. The oxygen in the 17 inch feed line recombined with everything in it's path and pretty much opened the external tank full of Hydrogen fuel like a zipper, converting everything to it's component atoms in the process.

The crew compartment, actually a double pressure shell construction, was blown off the top of the rest of the orbiter, and survived basically intact all the way to ocean impact.

Cracks in solid rocket motors are a standard failure method, and solid propellant rocket motors have a 4% failure rate (observed over many thousands of launches). If you want to blame this failure on someone/something, then the prime suspects are:

1) The Shuttle Program funding being cut in half at least twice during it's development, leading directly to the use of solid rocket strap-on boosters instead of liquid fuel engines, and

2) The politically correct stupidity of having a non-astronaut teacher on board that was so publicized in advanced that every news outlet on the planet wanted to see her go into space, making rational launch/no launch decisions career-enders that nobody wanted to chance (the two engineers who said they shouldn't launch for exactly the right reason were both fired after the fact).

When the Columbia exploded I remember thinking that looks bad. Then after a second or two I understood the flight was destroyed. You could tell the NASA commentator was confused and hoping somebody would give him the word that everything was all right.

It seemed to be minutes long but I guess it lasted less than several seconds.

Sitting in the workshop on my ship, the USS Guam. Then we sailed south from Norfolk and picked the nose cone for the booster that exploded out of the ocean, and a NASA heli came and picked it up off the deck.

I was tooling up the Gulf Freeway here in Houston when I heard the news about Challenger on the radio. Jumped off the freeway at a Stop 'n' Go and called the now ex-wife, and told her what I heard. She turned on the TV and all I could hear her say was "Oh, my God...oh dear God"...

Columbia--I was home recovering from surgery when it happened. I callled a friend and asked if he had his TV on. He said no, and then I said "Columbia broke up on reentry". I heard a mad scramble ass he searched for the TV remote while telling his wife the news...

9/ll--I was working nights, and had just woke up. I heard the DJ reporting that a second aircraft had just flown into the World Trade Center; that something serious was happening and they wouold say more ass the story developed. I went in and turned on the TV, and watched as the towers came down. I cried for most of the day, and have had a deep "disaffection" for Malicious Mo and his doctrines of hate ever since.

Home (presumably sick - as the school wasn't closed; but I honestly don't recall) listening to a portable radio for Challenger. Sitting at my desk reading Instapundit for Columbia. Standing in the doorway between the imaging room and the laptop repair bay at work when I heard that a plane hit the Pentagon (my mother worked there at the time, so it had rather more impact on me than did the WTC news despite being able to see the smoke plume from WTC later that day and having seen TV images of same. OTOH, she was on the entire other side and quite safe)

Good news - turning on the radio in my car after a job interview to hear about SpaceShip 1 (and since I got the job, a double bonus).

Like JFK moment for many the where I was moment is still crystal clear in my minds eye.

I haven't seen the film but I started a "Bucket List" just this week and no. 1. was to get up to Cape Canav and witness one of the last few launches. I've seen a few of the night launches, flaming streak. I've always been a NASA fanboy.

I was in the Library at Stone Middle School in Melbourne, FL. Shuttle launches were routine enough that no one was terribly excited about this one. I ran outside after the radio said there was an explosion in time to see the two SRBs shooting off in different directions and spiraling out of control.